Wrap Up 2021 and 2022 Goal-Setting
Planning the Word-Related Life for the Next 365 Days
Happy New Year’s Eve eve. I trust you are gathering your strength for the party ahead. Don’t overexert yourself reading Shelf Life today. You’ll need that energy to stay up till midnight tomorrow. It has been an entire year since I wrote the last one like this and I’m happy to be doing it again now, after Shelf Life’s first full calendar year of essays. I genuinely did not think I would have this many things to say.
Today while I was writing Shelf Life a thing happened that has never yet happened in about 140 Shelf Lifes written to date: My laptop turned off on me mid-sentence. The laptop said: “I’ve had enough of this garbage and I won’t accept one more word.” Actually it had just stopped charging for awhile. It was not fed up with writing Shelf Life; I just imagined it that way.
I have reading and writing goals for 2022 to share but first I’m going to give you a look back at how 2021 went.
I predicted that in 2021 I would get a COVID vaccine, see Black Widow, and have a milestone birthday and all those things came true, thank goodness. I actually got several COVID shots and saw Black Widow several times, but still only had the one birthday. I tried to overachieve in all things, but what can you do?
I planned on reading forty-two books in 2021 and I definitely did not read that many books. I read twenty books if I counted correctly, but it was still better than 2020 (worst reading year on record). Still more books than I’ve read in a year since 2017. Of the books on my list I did read This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone; Pet by Akwaeke Emezi; Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata; and The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. That’s actually pretty good for someone who gets off track as easily as I do. I did read a Sarah Gailey book in 2021 (The Echo Wife) though not the Sarah Gailey title I had on my list (Magic for Liars).
This is yet another year gone by without reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir even though I’m pretty sure I’d love it. I read about 20 pages of it but did not finish. My book club stayed in tact too and met nine times, my personal best streak for keeping a book club together, and I read seven books as part of that group (Possession and Never Let Me Go were selected but I had read them before).
In 2021 I did not flog myself through any books I was not enjoying so I DNF (did not finish) three titles I started (one of the DNFs was Gideon the Ninth, which I still intend to read).
In 2022 I’m looking forward to continuing with my Dark Academicians and will probably read eight or ten books with them. I also heard tell that my cousin is starting a book club so if that gets underway I’ll probably read some books with her friends as well. I have lowered my expectations for myself and have set a goal of twenty-four books to read in 2022 total, between both book clubs and any other personal reading—not counting re-reads of books I’ve read before.
I have almost nothing on my must-read list for 2022 except We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix, which is due for book club in January, and two forthcoming books from friends of mine. Nilah Magruder (Wutaryoo) and Gwen E Kirby (Shit Cassandra Saw) have books launching in January so obviously I have long since preordered.
On the topic of writing (my favorite topic): Last year at this time I had written approximately 80,000 words of Shelf Life and I said that if I continued on in that fashion I expected to finish 2021 with approximately 240,000 words of Shelf Life in the can (an average of around 2,300 words per each of 104 essays), although I hoped to curb the volume of each essay and keep it close to 200,000 (or an average of 1,900-ish words per essay).
Further evidence to support that there is no reigning in anything I do, I am closing the year just over 240,000 words (I was at 240,876 prior to writing today’s article). That’s about as long as The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is often cited as being too flipping long.
How many essays do you have to write to call yourself an essayist? I humbly request to be introduced from now on as American Essayist Catherine Forrest.
I submit, for your consideration, my favorite articles of 2021. If you missed any of these make sure you catch them:
“The Crusher of Dreams” is from like last week and I usually can’t make a critical assessment of anything I wrote for at least a few months but I included it here because I do like it a lot. There were other gems. I just picked my fave five.
I had an additional writing goal to complete any of the longform projects I have in process (three?) but that, also, did not happen (unsurprising). I did complete more short stories in 2021 than I have for many years (four), which is really gratifying. I would say maybe half of them are not awful. Any of them could go out on sub and some of them already are.
For 2022 I have set a much more reasonable goal of completing a short story each month for a total of twelve new stories completed. I did the impossible task of evaluating all the old projects that don’t deserve anymore of my time and effort and shuffling them into the trunk so the work surface, at least, is clear fresh work in 2022.
In Fall 2021 I convened a writing group that meets once monthly. We talk a bit about writing projects then write quietly in a shared physical space for a couple of hours with social breaks. I completed a story in each meeting that we had through the fall and winter. In 2022 we’re continuing to meet monthly in person and I added a second monthly session (virtual) for those who want to participate but are not local (and for local participants who aren’t already sick of me). This is really productive and all I’ll say on the subject is any writer who feels like they don’t write as much as they wish they did should consider starting or joining a group of this nature.
My other writing-related goal for 2022 is to use the em dash less. Who do I think I am, Emily Dickinson?
At the end of the day (year) I didn’t do all the stuff in 2021 that I put on the list of things to do, but I still feel great about all the stuff I got done. I find having a lot of goals and understanding that I will achieve 30 or 40 percent of them works well for me—I don’t beat myself up if I don’t accomplish everything but I also have enough goals in the hopper to make sure I don’t run out of stuff to work on.
All told, I have seventeen goals for 2022 in five different goal categories (only a small handful of them are reading- or writing-related and thus mentioned herein). I know I won’t complete all of them. I have already identified several as stretch goals that probably won’t get completed. It’s fine. Calling them “resolutions,” in my experience, is a disservice to myself. I’m not resolving to do something, meaning I will definitely do it or else fail in my resolution. I’m setting goals for things to do and if I do them that’s great! And if not, who cares?
Goals are cool because if you achieve them that’s great but it’s also fine if you don’t. Like in a game of soccer getting more goals than the other team means you won but if by the end of the game you got fewer goals than they did, you still played the whole game. Most people don’t even play soccer. If you make it all the way through an entire game of soccer you should be proud of yourself no matter how many goals you scored.
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